Thursday, November 30, 2017

Forget the Bombs

In between the far more important dissecting
of the sexual indiscretions of Matt Lauer, occasionally talking heads today
talked about the most recent missile testing and how that should affect the
passage of the horrible tax bill.

I've had a shitty day but at the end of the
day, I have the solution for the missile crisis, if any foreign leaders want
to listen to me. How to bring the United States to its knees without
spending a cent. I don't think.

It started like every day does, when I came
in here it was to finish writing Funny the World and post it.

To post these entries, I click on a
link that I saved years ago which goes directly to the Yahoo page where all
I do is to upload the files I need to upload, text and photos.

Only instead of getting that page, I
got a yahoo log-in page. No problem I put in my address and
password and it told me I had the wrong address and/or password.

Huh?

This started which became, I kid you not, a
day-long struggle to get back into Yahoo. Now there are several
problems. First of all, when we first got on the internet, my address
was basykes@dcn.davis.ca.us
But after a few years, Davis Community Network (dcn) shortened all of our
addresses to dcn.org, which is easier to type. But before that, I had
joined all sorts of websites with the original address, and they didn't
recognize the dcn.org extension

Add to that that I have a gmail account and
for a lot of political things that I don't want to clutter my dcn mailbox, I
use my gmail account and once in awhile will use that email address for
something else.

Now let's talk about passwords. I have
a handful that I rotate. One is based on information from when I lived
in San Francisco, one is a Lawsuit-based phrase, two are birthday related.
I never did try a password saver and am sort of sorry now that I did not.
But I have a long typed list kept on WordPefect, which is fine unless the
computer itself breaks down, in which case the file is backed up on a flash
drive.

The list itself is meaningless to anybody but
me because it is coded. For example, if I have a password that is
based on the word "fox" with lots of either words or numbers attached to it,
the list read "fox one." Only I know what to add to "fox" to make it a
true password.

So I started trying variations of my log in
with different passwords and none of them worked. I finally found one
that worked, but it took me to the wrong web site.

See, when I worked for Dr. G., he had me set
up a web site for him. Anyone finding it would think it's a porn site
since it's where he has before and after pictures of his labial cosmetic
surgeries. He eventually got someone to make a different site for
him....same photos, different design, which was fine because by that time
I'd left his employ anyway. But the web site still exists and that's
all Yahoo would lead me to.

My two problems -- one was to delete
Michael's account, and two was to get back to the upload page for Funny the
world.

Do you think Yahoo has an easy to find
customer service phone or email address. Of course not. Every
page I came to that looked promising led me to a page with articles to read
none of which addressed the issue of how to delete your former boss's porn
page so you could use your own journal page.

A guy from Facebook started sending me
suggestions, which either didn't work or were things that I had already
tried.

I finally got the attention of a couple of
Yahoo people (I am resisting the temptation to call them a couple of yahoos)
who started helping me. I played the old lady card ("Have pity--I'm
nearly 75 years old and haven't had to do any programming in years").

Looking back on the time line of my exchange
of emails with ultimately "Chris" I see that from the first time I posted a
"help" plea on their customer discussion board until Chris finally got me
back on line again was roughly 6 hours.

Six hours of frustration with inability to
get onto Yahoo mixed with news of Matt Lauer's indiscretions and Trump's
stupidity and worry about my friend who is having a pacemaker installed on
Monday and this was not my best day. (Nor was it a good day for Lauer
or my friend!)

But based on how I handled all of this
emotionally made me realize that if you go anywhere in this country
today what do you see? People on their phones. Standing,
walking, lying down, eating meals, before a play and at intermission and
definitely as soon as the show ends. People rarely talk with each
other because they are busy on their phones doing....whatever.

Now, thinking about how frustrated I was, how
much I ate, how much I paced, how much I tore my hair out I realized that
anybody who wants to take over this country just has to pull the
internet plug. Leave us without the ability to reach the internet,
send email, tweet (yes, please don't let the president tweet!), etc. we will
be so destroyed that whatever one would do with a country that has been
bombed into oblivion, you can do with a country that is still intact, but
peopled by a citizenry walking around, bug-eyed, mumbling, and fruitlessly
punching buttons on their non-working machines.